September 27, 2016

Stories with a Secret, Never to Be Told: an interview with Robert J. Wiersema, author of "Seven Crow Stories"

In his debut collection Seven Crow Stories, best-selling novelist Robert J. Wiersema draws on myth and folktale, ghost stories, and fairy tales to share a glimpse of the worlds bordering our own. With his short fiction, Wiersema explores the mysterious realms of the shadows, the mirrorlands where time runs strange.

Gef: What
is the allure to folktales for you? Was there a specific mythology
that influenced you in your writing early on?

Robert: Folk
tales are alluring to me on a couple of levels. First, and primarily,
they’re a source of wonder, of magic, of hints of another world, or
more worlds. The realistic and the fantastic exist side by side,
sometimes comfortably, sometimes less so. And that approach, I think
pretty apparently, has shaped my writing in a profound way. The other
way they are alluring is that they form something of a common
language, a language that transcends tongues and borders, rich in
symbols and deep meanings which, in many cases, transcend the
rational altogether. As far as early influences (vis a vis folktale
and myth), I would love to say Celtic mythology, or the folklore of
television, but I think it would probably be the Bible. The Bible,
for a kid in Sunday school, isn’t a collection of proscriptions and
restrictions, it’s a font of stories, many of which have stuck with
me my entire life (long after any sense of organized faith had been
abandoned).

Gef: How
did this collection come about? Was this something you originally
envisioned as a complete book or did the stories kind of lend
themselves to being collected like this?

Robert:Seven
Crow Stories has been a long time coming, but in an odd way. About 25
years ago, listening to the Counting Crows first album, I made a
connection: in the traditional counting rhyme, seven crows stands for
a secret, never to be told. That struck me as describing a particular
kind of story, a story in which questions are raised which aren’t
always answered, or are answered in ways which may not seem like
answers. Stories in which the main narrative may (or may not) wrap
up, but there are elements unresolved lurking beneath the surface. I
began to refer to those types of stories – in my own writing – as
“seven crow stories”, stories with a secret, never to be told.
And I knew that if I ever published a collection of stories, it would
be that kind of story, with that title. And seven stories only. (I’m
a fan of the symmetry.) I’m not a frequent short story writer, so I
was surprised by the number of stories I actually had, once I started
pulling them out of drawers and off old hard drives. Seven Crow
Stories is a very tight selection, guided by the types of stories,
and the stories I wanted to tell between the stories, and between my
work as a whole. There are characters in these stories, for example,
who also appear in Black Feathers, and in the forthcoming The Fallow
Heart (a Henderson novel), the links between them being another kind
of secret. (The other thing that was important to me was that I
couldn’t mess with the stories. In a sense, this collection is like
archeology, each story reflective of a moment in my life, a
particular time, and I didn’t want to lose that by revising to this
current moment. I edited and polished and scrubbed off egregious
burrs, but I didn’t do any wholesale revision – these are the
final versions of stories as much as twenty-five years old.)

Gef: How
have you found your progression as a writer thus far?

Robert:I’m
probably not the right one to answer this, if only because any answer
I can give is liable to be made up of contradictions. Writing has
become easier for me, even as it has become much more difficult. I’m
much more conscious of the process, though I work better when I
ignore any rational thought. Planning is the best approach; I am a
terrible planner. It’s the best thing in the world; it’s a
misery.

That’s
not very helpful, is it?

Gef: How
intensive does the research process get for you?

Robert:I
was at an author breakfast last year, on the same bill with a couple
of non-fiction writers, and I cracked the audience up by saying that
the reason I wrote fiction was because I didn’t have to worry that
much about research; I could just make things up. Which was perfect,
for someone as inherently lazy as myself. They didn’t know I wasn’t
kidding.

Gef: Who
do you count among your writing influences?

Robert:There
are so many, and it’s a constantly evolving list, even today. John
Irving’s The World According to Garp told me it was okay to be
messed up, and to live a writer’s life. In no particular order, and
they inspired in different ways: John Crowley, Stephen King, Neil
Gaiman, Alice Munro, Charles de Lint, Jonathan Carroll, Michael
Moorcock, Helen Oyeyemi, Joan Didion, Elmore Leonard, Elena
Ferrante...

Gef: Is
there any kind of a gear shift writing-wise for you when switching
story lengths?

Robert:There
isn’t actually, and that’s somewhat problematic. I approach every
piece of fiction in precisely the same way, which means I write
stories in the same why I write novels, rather than as their own
form. It also means that concepts I think would make good stories end
up as novellas or novels...

Gef: What
is the worst piece of writing advice you ever received? Or what piece
of writing advice do you wish
would just go away?

Robert:I
tell this to my students early in every semester: “write what you
know” is a terrible piece of advice, as far as people understand
it. What I don’t tell them is that that advice hamstrung me for a
long time, limiting me to a regressive circle of autobiographically
inspired works... I shudder to think, actually. Far better is the
addition of one word: “writer from what you know”. Or better yet,
and my default approach: “writer (from) what you fear.”

Gef: What
kind of guilty pleasures do you have when it comes to books or movies
or whatnot?

Robert:I
don’t actually believe in the concept of guilty pleasures. Why
should pleasure be guilty? There are some folks who think my comic
book reading should be a guilty pleasure – I ignore those people as
much as possible. I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly AND the Paris
Review, I read Batman and Fables and Saga and The Wicked &amp;
The Divine, and I read Marlon James and AS Byatt and Robertson Davies
and Carol Shields and Edward St. Aubyn (I’m looking at the shelf to
my immediate left, too lazy to get up to make the point) and I don’t
feel guilty about any of them. Nor should anyone. Read/watch/listen
to what you want, to what makes your heart sing, to what makes you
think.

Gef: What
projects are you cooking up that folks can expect in the near future,
and how can folks keep up
with your shenanigans?

Robert:My
webpage is long-neglected, and should perhaps be ignored, but people
can find me on Facebook or Twitter. That’s where I’ll be talking
about things like The Fallow Heart, the first novel set in Henderson,
a love story about death and a mythic story about two small,
seemingly unimportant people, which I’m revising now, and Cold
Roses, the novel still in handwritten manuscript, and Strayed, which
I’m about to leap (back) into, as my project for the fall.